MUDe

Description

MUDs are Multi-User Dimensions, online worlds created by language alone. In a collection that throws Irish poetry into the electronic age, John Redmond explores the Internet and car culture, MUDs and moods. New forms of post-industrial community enable us to co-exist facelessly across time and distance, connected but solitary in the virtual realities of the motorway and the Internet. In the title poem, the reader becomes game-player in Redmond's fictional MUD, where a traditional Irish landscape blurs with fantasy elements. Redmond creates a new kind of poetry from the online world's fissiparous language, elliptical, self-interrupting, and fizzing with invention.

John Redmond was born in Dublin in 1967. After completing a D. Phil on the subject of contemporary poetry at Oxford, he taught for two years at Macalester College in Minnesota. Currently he is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Liverpool. He reviews poetry widely and was associated with the poetry magazine, Thumbscrew. His has published a textbook How to Write a Poem (Oxford: Blackwell) and he is writing a critical book Privatising Poetry: The Loss of Faith in the Public Sphere in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry.

"Apoet to enjoy now and watch out for in the future." "The Observer""